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Now you know me, I view blog posts like cheese.  I like to let them age for a bit, get nice and ripe and then take a bite into them and get food poisoning and then puke in front of my in-laws all over my wife’s ailing grandmother and that’s why she divorced me.

So I can understand your shock in seeing a blog post so soon after the last one.  Don’t worry, I’m not trying to overwhelm you.  If I were going to do that, I would use one of my many doomsday devices for the purpose.

Rather, this is just to address something I was chatting up with my good friend, Robert J. Bennet, author of Mr. Shivers (which you should totally check out if you like darker elements of magical realism and/or hobos on trains).  To give a post of the twitter transcript would be a huge pain in the anus, and my anus can bear no more pain, earthly or spiritual, but he made a pretty solid blog post about it here.

A lot of what we wound up talking about was how motivation makes a villain terrifying or…not.  A summation of his point (and feel free to tell me if I’m mistaken, Robert) would be that a villain with indiscernible or unfathomable motivation is infinitely more terrifying than a villain who has a genuine emotion behind him.

To some extent, it’s true.  To look at his comparison of the Joker and Lord Voldemort, there’s no doubt that the Joker is the more terrifying villain.  Though I kind of suspect the comparison is a little unfair.  For one, the Joker has been around much longer and even he started off as a goofy lunatic dressed up like a clown who was concerned about boners.  It wasn’t until the writers of Batman stopped focusing on the “clown” part and started addressing the fact that this guy was terrifyingly insane that he started to be scary.  And that was because someone that insane, who could kill a thousand people to make a point and wore clown make-up like war paint, occupies a strange little uncanny valley in our brains where it’s not likely to happen, but it could happen and just enough of it is realistic that it scares us.

Most of us probably don’t lie awake at night fearing that evil wizards are out to get us because we’re awesome.

But then again, most of us would probably not follow a tremendously overweight, hairy guy in a dirty trenchcoat into the night just because he told us we were special.

Harry Potter is weird.

So yes, the Joker is a more terrifying villain.  It’s not necessarily his motive that’s unfathomable so much as his logic.  He views society as a joke, sanctity as a set-up and murder as a punchline.  The beauty of Batman, as I’ve mentioned before, is that there are no fights, just philosophical dialogues with fists and Joker isn’t going to stop arguing until Batman gets it.  The fact that Batman is never going to get it is pretty terrifying.

That momentary nerdgasm aside, I feel the need to point out that the whole “unfathomable motive” thing can go hugely awry in a very quick, very awful way.  Frequently, citing Lovecraft as an inspiration as the same way people cite Restless Leg Syndrome as a serious medical condition, people will use words like “unfathomable” and “beyond words” and “too horrifying to be described” and think they’re clever when they’re really just being lazy.  The goal is to have created something so horrifying that it just can’t be expressed in mortal terms, but these kinds of buzzwords tend to suggest that it is just too horrible to be expressed in mortal terms and you’re going to have to take the artist’s word at that because he can’t be arsed to show you himself.

This sort of lazy thinking is the same reason we get Dark Lords, Destroyers and Foes of All That Is Good.  Villains whose logic is so unfathomable and so inscrutable that it simply isn’t there, whose motivations are so vast and so horrific that they just don’t make sense, and not in a good way.  Hopping on the Bandwagon of Darkness tends to lead more often to Saturday Morning Cartoon Villains than to Jokers.  Hell, the Joker was a Saturday Morning Cartoon Villain for a while.  It took a long time for him to be something much more terrifying.

Given that, I can appreciate Robert’s thoughts as to why the Joker is terrifying.  But I feel he’s kind of missing the point in a more human villain.

See, what makes the unfathomable terrifying is that it’s vast, it’s unstoppable and it can’t be reasoned with.  It’s inhuman.  And in being inhuman, it loses us, at least a little bit.  This is why Dark Lords aren’t good villains: the characters are largely insignificant and pointless.  We don’t care what he’s doing because he’s just that evil.  We have to stop him, sure, but that’s as far as the stakes go.

Human villains are not vast or unreasonable and that’s their appeal.  They are distorted reflections, what happens when something happens in a hero’s life that makes him do something that he views as right.  And it’s that last part, viewing it as right, that makes a villain interesting.  Suddenly, he has a reason for doing what he does beyond the fact that he’s evil and since we can understand it, we have some knowledge of what happens if he wins and if he loses.  Sympathetic villains are popular for a reason.  If the villain is just straight up evil, the ending is pretty much foregone: either the heroes win and all is saved or the author is feeling edgy and oh no they lost and now you feel used like the page-turning hussy your mama always said you were.

A sympathetic villain makes you have a stake in what he does and thus enhances the conflict.  Suddenly, the implications are no longer about what happens if the hero loses but what happens if he wins. It turns that mirror upon the hero, to see if he’s actually doing the right thing and leads to character development.  If he’s facing The Destroyer/The Dark Lord/The Goblin King, he doesn’t have to change.  The other guy is evil, so he’s good.  His only problem is stopping the evil.

I have heard some people lament over the lack of straight up black and white heroes (though, to be totally honest, I get the vague suspicion that some, not all, of those people prefer the notion because black versus white used to be much more terrifying in its implications as to who the savage evil orcs were supposed to be) and I can certainly appreciate a straightforward “evil is evil” story when it’s done right.

But it takes a long time to do it right.  Joker long.  Until then, all you’ve got is boners.

But maybe I’m wrong.  What do you think?  Are we just so morally starved that even our villains need to be examples of goodness?  Or do we straight up need bad guys who are so bad they kick orphaned kittens into the mouths of old ladies so the old ladies choke and die and then they pose the old ladies in hilarious poses for their loved ones to find?

Tell me.

Tell me everything.

So, if you pay attention to this blog at all, you’ve probably recognized that I, and a lot of people who talk on this blog, do a lot of bashing on worldbuilding. For what we assume to be good reason.

The argument is pretty easy to see if you peruse this blog: worldbuilding adds unnecessary fluff that deviates from plot, character development and overall deadens the sense of wonder by way of murdering with detail.

That’s the argument.  I’m not sure it’s right, but that’s the one I’ve been sticking with.

It occurs to me, though, that we don’t see a lot of talk about it from the other side: those who praise worldbuilding, who drool over magic systems and gush about the language of the birds and all the subtle nuances of the tone and touch of a Wombatman.  Perhaps it’s that I’m simply missing something.  Maybe there’s some glory to worldbuilding that I’m just not clear on?  Maybe it adds in a way I hadn’t considered before?

This is my humble request, if you are indeed one of those people who clings to the notion: what is it?  What am I missing?  Am I using the entirely wrong definition of worldbuilding?  Am I just too dense to grasp it?  In the interests of discussing this and furthering everyone’s collective knowledge, I’d genuinely like to know.

So tell me.  Either here, in email, whatever you want.  We should know this.

So, the progress on The Skybound Sea is…solid.  It’s moving, in any event, and moving in a forward direction.  That’s not a bad thing.  It is, however, not moving as fast as I would like it to and as a result, blogging and general forms of communication are taking a hit for it, which is also not a bad thing.  Presumably, you enjoy my writing as much as my blog or you probably wouldn’t be here and, as a result, you might not take offense if the latter bleeds a little for the former.  Hopefully, that’s not a bad thing.

But since this is my blog and we are here to talk about bad things, I would like to expose you all a little to Scott Adams’ latest insanity.

I’m not linking directly to his site because I don’t at all mind denying him some traffic and I’m not going to list the previous episodes of the great saga of Mr. Adams’ douchebaggery which, at this point, is becoming something that can only be described as mythical, as in so fantastic it can hardly be believed.  Mr. Jeff Fecke of the blog I just linked does a fine job of it, anyway, which was lovely of him to write.  But, in the interests of not being completely useless, let me summarize things for you.

Inceptum: Scott Adams draws Dilbert, a cartoon that hasn’t been relevant in a format that hasn’t been relevant for years now.  And given that everyone now knows what a memo is and isn’t really stirred to laughter by the observation that managers can sometimes be incompetent, our boy Scott is desperately looking for a new way to keep from fading out of notice.

Medius: Scott Adams discovers that people who say stupid shit online often get a lot of attention.

Terminus: Scott Adams puts his certified genius to work for him by making sweeping revelations to astound the minds of mere mortals by likening women to angry children, the womens’ rights movement to a weary joke, men to slavering rape-machines incapable of controlling themselves and people who don’t agree with him to simpering chimps at keyboards.  Any contradiction or question angled toward him is met with the rolling of eyes and the gentle reminder that this is just fact and if you have a problem with it, you’re living in denial.

It’s that last part we should pay attention to because it’s that last part that actually has some relevance on what we should talk about as writers.  Because frankly, we’ve probably all been guilty of it at some point.

The thing is, you’ve probably heard that before in a few ways and with good reason.  The blatant acceptance of fact tends to be rather closely linked with some common complaints of SF/F in general: that it’s conservative, that it doesn’t do a lot of pushing of social mores, that it’s insensitive and underutilizes characters of different orientations.  And likewise, we tend to accept it all with our various reasons: “a woman couldn’t beat up a man, that’s just impossible,” “women didn’t have equal rights in a medieval society,” “a gay person couldn’t function normally in this kind of society so we can’t use it here” and variations on “that wouldn’t happen.”

Which baffles me.

I mean, presumably we’re writing in this particular genre because of the freedom it allows, because of the worlds we can create and because of the characters we throw into it.  Why some people are so eager to slap down rules, constraints and the same sort of legalities that govern our every day life is, to me, more than a little baffling. I mean, why invent a vast, sprawling world if you want it to act, look, feel and work exactly like medieval England except with one or two twists (“yes, well, my peasants shovel their own feces instead of animals'”).  Why not do whatever the hell you want?

By that, of course, I’m not suggesting that you do just throw things around willy-nilly with violent whimsy and fuck whoever takes exception to that.  I’m merely suggesting you think carefully about the discrepancies between rules and logic.

Logic suggests that the wilting flower of a woman wouldn’t be able to fight off a big man, logic suggests that a homosexual character probably wouldn’t find acceptance very readily in a society that is theoretically more regressive than our own modern one in which this is still a challenge, logic suggests that a society based on patriarchy wouldn’t value womens’ rights very much.

But logic doesn’t say that a woman couldn’t find a way to fight a big man through one way or another, logic doesn’t say that a homosexual character couldn’t exist, persevere and even find some measure of happiness in the face of adversity, logic doesn’t say that women wouldn’t think of rights as being all that important even if not a lot of people do, logic doesn’t say “that can’t happen.”

Rules do.

Logic is something you can twist, bend, mold and adapt, like clay.  You can use it to change a character, to change society, to change reality and readers will love it because you’re offering that by changing the world around them instead of pulling stuff out of your anus to fit the plot.  Rules are just constraints.  They do not change.  They do not alter.  Your reader will be bored because, once they figure out the rules, they know what’s going to happen.  You need logic.  You don’t need rules.

But the reason we bring Scott Adams into all of this is because he represents a very real danger from following the rules, from accepting fact too easily, from twisting yourself until your logic becomes as immutable as rules: you can start thinking that people on an individual level have rules, that people act a certain way, that black people do this, that white people do this.

That’s not just insane.  That’s not just unsatisfying for a reader.  That’s the antithesis of writing, regardless of genre.  You are not there to tell people how everyone in the world is.  At least, not directly.  You’re there to tell them how these people are and how these people relate to the world around them, which is not something that anyone else would do, because you’re writing them and you aren’t anyone else and people will read you because of that.

And if you’re playing by rules, then you simply aren’t being yourself.

Doubt fact.

Forget rules.

Challenge everything.

So, by now, you might have noticed that Tome of the Undergates is on Kindle, but not Nook, and Black Halo is taking its sweet time getting to either one.  I’ve gotten a number of emails about this and I thought I’d make a post for clarification on exactly why it is that my books, while certainly heading to the eReaders, are doing so with all the desperation of an overweight cannibal chasing a quadruple amputee doused in honey mustard.

First of all: yes, we have absolutely every plan to put them on every goddamn eReader we possibly can.

Secondly: no, it isn’t a matter of corporate greed or sticky red-tape tactics on behalf of Pyr or Amazon/Barnes and Noble/iBooks.

Thirdly: yes, laziness probably does factor into it, but not on our parts.  Lou Anders busts his bottom more than most editors in all things, and this is no exception, which brings us to the real reason why it’s taking so long…

We don’t want to look like shit.

I mean, if you’ve picked up any eBook by now, you’ve probably come across one or two that look less like a work of fiction and more like the disjointed, erratic manifesto of a madman.  eBooks tend to be riddled with errors and formatting problems of all kinds, largely because a lot of publishers are content to throw a .pdf file out there and call it a day.

Given that Pyr puts exactly 2.4 metric asstons of effort into the interior of their books, though, they are not all that willing to just toss it aside.  The end result is that our eBooks look really good, with proper formatting, illustrations and fonts all preserved.  The side effect is that such a thing takes a lot of time and effort on behalf of Lou and our lovely assistant editor, Rene Sears.

So, yes.  It’s coming.  It’s just coming slowly and carefully, like a heart surgeon.

…well, that was wrapped up rather quick, wasn’t it?  I’m a little disappointed that didn’t take at all as long as I’m used to.  I mean, usually, there’s a lot of meandering and metaphors to artificially inflate my posts so that you think I have something to say.  Admittedly, you might be feeling a little stiffed.  Here, let me make it up to you by saying exactly the same thing in a snippet from my latest project: a Dante’s Inferno-style biography of Lou Anders that I’m calling The Anderman.

Canto 6, Verse 22

And because I showed no fear, he wanted me to know more,

thus he opened the doors and I beheld them: shackled to their desks,

in life hereafter as they had been in life waking.  Perhaps it was

the editor’s great sin that he be damned to a hell without love lost,

knives in the belly, soddering irons in the flesh, fire in the spirit.

Nay, we had lived too long and too little to earn anything but this.

Our hell was repetition.

I leaned beside one of the damned, his eyes glass and his fingers curled,

and he looked to me and spake:

“Yea, Anderman, thou hast come far and with great fear in thy heart,

but a heart thy still possesseth and thou art cruel to come show it to those

who yet crave to have one beating in their chest.”

Said I to he:

“Pray, you unfortunate soul, what dost thou dwell here before thy glass screen?”

“Ah, canst thou be so relentlessly vulgar as to not know, Anderman?

Perhaps thy heart beats only with fear,

thy love spent long ago.

Knowest thou that we toil to amend the sin of poor formatting,

a year for each typo, as the Devil’s due,

and as the Devil is petty this is indeed a vengeance served

for that time he tried to read The Lies of Locke Lamora and we

accidentally replaced “Locke” with “Steve.”

I turned to my guide and begged him to take me away,

I could not bear the sight of these tragedies.

And my partner blinked once, the sound of glass shattering,

and returned to a work that would never be finished

as though I had never even looked at him.

Would that I never had.

If you missed me at Phoenix Comicon, you are basically a big ol’ smelly ol’ mean ol’ ol’ troll and I hate you forever.  Lee Whiteside puts intense effort into this sonofabitch and you just threw it all away!  It’s okay, Lee.  I appreciate you.

If you came to see me, though, you probably want your money back because I am a perpetual disappointment.  All of my panels were well-attended, and for that I am pleased, but I was frequently a disgrace and a lout at most of them.  I spent a very lengthy conversation with Michael Stackpole over whether or not it is funny to taze an elderly woman (I still kind of think it is, if the context is right).  I called Paul Cornell a dick at least six times in public view (in private view, I put an index card in front of him and told him to eat it).  John Scalzi, at one point, spoke loudly and with great disgust: “I have been MOISTENED by Sam Sykes!” (no, I won’t explain, ask him).

And I got to see my good friend, James A. Owen again, who gave us a very awesome present (again, you’ll have to ask Scalzi).

That is to say, it was a super fun weekend and I’m really glad everyone who came did so.

Probably one of the best aspects of this weekend was meeting Cherie Priest.  From her tweets, her writing and her austere, enigmatic pictures, I kind of suspected she would be a reserved, quiet and dignified creature.

…no.

Ms. Priest is basically the closest thing to a Leprechaun I have ever met.  She is very, very exuberant when she talks and she starts hopping up and down like she’s going to tell you a riddle or something and then it’s infectious and you’re hopping up and down and it’s really, really fun talking to her and you just want to keep talking and then she stops hopping and you’re still hopping and she’s like “dude, control yourself.”

Also, her husband likes pugs, so, I mean, yeah.

John Scalzi is ever a delight to hang out with and, if I were you, I’d keep an eye on his blog for something really important in the coming days.  Seriously.  You’re going to want to watch it.

The priority of delight, however, goes to the people who came to my panel, the people with a lust for talking about writing.  I adore these panels and I adore Comicon for giving me the opportunity to spaz out in front of a large audience, whom I equally adore for their enthusiasm and exuberance for the subjects, which we all adore.  So there is a lot of adoration going on.  Thanks to all the fans and moderators who made it possible.

I actually quite liked the idea of an epic fantasy-themed set of panels, like we had.  From Worldbuilding to Magic Systems to Combat Writing, we managed to touch on a lot of very cool bases and subjects and I like to think a lot of people were helped by what we (Michael Stackpole, James A. Owen) and myself had to say on the subject.

But, as fun as they were, I think I might have liked the other panels on Social Media and the Big Idea even better.  Why?  Because they came away with a message that I’d like to share with you.

Writing is not a competitive sport.

Don’t look at it that way.  There may be blogs saying that only ONE can emerge triumphant.  There may be awards recognizing excellence.  There may be hordes of people proclaiming one way or another.  But writing is not about competition.  There is no such thing as a reader that only buys one book and, thus, they are probably not looking at you and thinking “well, what has he done to EARN my love?”

What I love about these cons is that they reinforce that message: writing is not necessarily about community, but it is there.  James A. Owen and John Scalzi have both helped me out tremendously, much more than they had to, just as other authors have helped them out.  Just as I hope to help other authors out some day.  I have never met an author that wasn’t supportive.  We want each other to succeed.  It’s good karma, it’s in our own best interests as professionals and it’s just plain a good feeling.  Think of this when you aspire to be a writer, not what they have and what you don’t.

So, I guess, the message of this is that if you are in Arizona and you are not at Phoenix Comicon, you are a vagrant and I hate you until you come.  Then we can be besties.

See you all next year!